Drawing Health

For me, art has always been therapeutic. Feeling alone and unimportant sometimes permeates my life. Wishing someone would care or help doesn’t make life better, so if I’m paying attention to my downward spirals, I usually start drawing…a lot. It’s not an instantaneous cure, but it usually gets me through the days.

I like to watch videos of great artists drawing and painting to see if I can glean some techniques that I don’t know. The videos usually put me to sleep, but I keep trying to get through them.

The Viking skeleton is turning out really good. In our next session I’ll be working on the crow’s wing going up my client’s back.

The two coverups using koi fish are coming along. We’ll begin working on the background elements in the next session.

I put in the Mayor from the movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s finally starting to look like a full sleeve. I’d like to touch up all the old work on his forearm but I think he just wants to get it finished. I forget sometimes that getting tattoos is expensive for people.

Here is a sketch for a tattoo that a local firefighter wants to get in memory of a child he found dead in a water canal recently. It was a very traumatic experience for him.

I started a coverup that will work into a full armored sleeve design.

Here is a sketch for an upper arm tattoo.

And just to get out of town for awhile and do something different, I went to Reno to the art store that I worked at in 1996. Every week they have a live model sit and people can come and draw or paint for a few hours. It’s been a few years since I’ve drawn from a live model. Normally I have to work from photos because who the heck wants to sit still for 3 hours? Such a different experience though working from life. It was good practice.

Here’s a picture of me with my son from 2001. Today is 9/11, and I remember living in my parents’ basement at the time trying to raise a new baby on my own. He’s 18 now. I remember my dad (who is now deceased) coming into the room and telling me America had just been attacked. I scooped up my son and ran upstairs to watch the news with my dad. It all seemed so surreal.